Progress

I typed another old story, "The Price of Progress." I wrote it on a whim, and thus made it my first-ever voluntary short story. At the time, I was a pretty radical kind of person, especially because I was in the throes of some teenage hell. It's funny, because this is the first part of what I intended to be a two-part story, but I read Fountainhead before I began part two, and my view of selfishness changed completely. There's still some goodness in this story. I like the aggressive style, but I'm never going back. My mellowness now is too nice.

Treason

"Treason" is now part of the site. I wrote it in 2002 (fall semester, junior year of high school) as an assignment for English class. The idea was to imitate the Southern Gothic style we had recently reviewed. I put a ton of description in here, that's for sure. I remember that, at that time, it was a little over-the-top for me; I've become more sparse in my writing since then. I'm not sure it should really be called "Treason," because I don't think the final bit of dialogue uses the proper definition of the word. But the past is the past.

As a side note, one line of the dialogue in this story was the inspiration for a little literary magazine I wanted to run with Lisa and my room mate during my first year of college. It was to be called the Yankee Spy. Lisa still makes fun of me for that.

Case File Updates

The site has been "updated." I took out the goofy CGI stuff that ran the front page and its linked stories. Instead, it's plain old HTML, lacking even style sheets or document-specified fonts/colors. I guess it's kind of ugly, but that's not what matters, anyway.

More importantly, I added "Equinox" to the list. I was holding off until I sent it to a publisher, but I decided I'll just keep it. If you haven't already read it, take a look!

I also removed Armored Core. This is due in part to the old conversion issue I had that caused all em-dashes to become ellipses. Mainly, though, I am fixing it up so that all the formatting remains intact, including italics, "smart quotes," and what have you. Because the damn thing is so long, I'll have to comb through it before I can put it back up. The stories I already have here should suffice.

Finally, I'll be adding some of my older stories from high school. These are not very good, but it's still some nice history.

Supplemental Materials

With my recent exile from Boston University has come the chance to dig through my old writing docket. It contains such relics as the last printed manuscript of my book, the only handwritten version of it anywhere, the original 50-page story I wrote in eighth grade, various versions of other stories, and notes for all of the above. The Armored Core notes are the most interesting, so I've added them to the new AC Supplements section.

Nicenet

I just visited an old friend from my Milton days. It was the site we used to collaborateo or whatever outside of sophomore year English class. Mrs. Graham was trying to get with the program and do stuff on the Internet, but it was really lost on us. Why not just hand out these assignments, turn them in, and talk about them in class? Well, we usually did that, but she insisted on Nicenet sometimes. 2001–2002 was still a time when high school kids used computers exclusively for counter-strike and AOL (and probably pornography). Class on the Internet? What!

As for these screenshots, this was the first time I got away with academic murder. Ah, 10th grade. Where has the time, and the GPA, gone?

What was this paper going to be about? I'm glad you asked! Can you tell I'm Lutheran?